Orion SkyView Pro 8 EQ vs. SkyView Deluxe 8 EQ

Does anybody see a big difference between these 2 scopes? I just recieved the Orion catalog and these look like good equatorial mounted scopes. The Pro 8 EQ seems to have a VERY sturdy mount. How does the tracking work? It can come with TrueTrack single or dual drives. What exactly does the drive do and how hard/easy is it to work? Thanks for the info as always,

tc

Hi, Personally I would prefer the F5 version as it would have less coma and nicer veiws of the planets. Also the eyepeices would work better. The faster the scope (lower F-Ratio} the better your eyepeices have to be. The sturdier mount would really be nice too. The clock drive it comes with is an on/off pre-set drive. If you align your mount to the celestial pole, or close, it will keep an object in the field of veiw for a while depending on how well you aligned and how close the speed of the drive is to ideal. (Not counting periodic errors} The F-4 version would let you get to a lower power and have a little wider feild of veiw for sweeping the Milkyway, but I think I would prefer a little less FOV with less coma. Hope that helps, Ron